Processing of affective faces varying in valence and intensity in shy adults: An event-related fMRI study.

Abstract

Recent behavioral and electrocortical studies have found that shy and socially anxious adults are hypersensitive to the processing of negative and ambiguous facial emotions. We attempted to extend these findings by examining the neural correlates of affective face processing in shy adults using an event-related fMRI design. We presented pairs of faces that varied in affective valence and intensity. The faces were morphed to alter the degree of intensity of the emotional expressive faces. Twenty-four (12 shy and 12 non-shy) young adult participants then made same/different judgments to these faces while in an MR scanner. We found that shy adults exhibited greater neural activation across a distinct range of brain regions to pairs of faces expressing negative emotions, moderate levels of emotional intensity, and emotional faces that were incongruent with one another. In contrast, non-shy individuals exhibited greater neural activation across a distinct range of brain regions to pairs of faces expressing positive emotions, low levels of emotional intensity, and emotional faces that were congruent with one another. Findings suggest that there are differences in neural responses between shy and non-shy adults when viewing affective faces that vary in valence, intensity, and discrepancy.

Emotional processing in patients with mild cognitive impairment: The influence of the valence and intensity of emotional stimuli

“…Overall, the emotions that are easier for both groups to identify are fear, anger and joy, whereas sadness and surprise were those that were hardest to detect. Individuals with MCI presented a floor effect with regards the emotion of disgust, whereby the intensity did not influence its detection and such individuals had remarkable problems in identifying this emotion [45,46], even at strong intensities. In these individuals, intensity also had a weak influence on the emotions of surprise and sadness, yet it had a very clear influence on fear and anger, in accordance with previous studies [35,36].…”

“…It was suggested that older people perceived EFEs worse than younger people when these expressions were weak [44], with older subjects benefitting more when the intensity of the EFEs of anger, fear and sadness increased. Other similar studies also suggest that intensity is important when identifying facial expressions [45][46][47].…”

Processing of different types of social threat in shyness: Preliminary findings of distinct functional neural connectivity

“…fMRI studies employing "less threatening" social stimuli have demonstrated increased modulation of the dorsal (dACC) and superior temporal sulcus to faces with moderate emotional intensity and ambiguous faces, respectively, in shy adults (Tatham, Schmidt, Beaton, Schulkin, & Hall, 2013); and sustained amygdalar and hippocampal activation to neutral faces in a 2 TANG ET AL. group of extremely inhibited individuals, although some of them met criteria for social anxiety disorders (Blackford, Allen, Cowan, & Avery, 2013).…”

Individual differences in social reward and threat expectancies linked to grey matter volumes in key regions of the social brain

“…has been consistently demonstrated in individuals who are social inhibited, shy, and socially anxious. [154][155][156][157][158][159] Further, resting amygdala-pSTS functional connectivity has been linked to biased social attention and perception in social anxiety. 146,160 Collectively, this work suggests that chronic hypervigilance for threat may result from, or result in, increased rGMV in right pSTS.…”